If you haven't heard, Lumberyard went into beta. This is a serious game engine, with tools and full source. No license fees and no revenue share. They basically just want you to use AWS as your backend and they encourage this by providing APIs to their new GameLift as well as other core services familiar to AWS users such as S3, etc. Then they can bill you standard for AWS services and give the game engine and source out free. Using AWS seems totally optional though. It's just a free middleware package as far as I can tell.

I don't have time to check this out just yet, but I've flipped through their tools docu on some of the features I would lean on heavily in any middleware package, which for me are mainly animation and physics tools, and they seem to have it all. Very cool stuff. I'm months away from finishing the work on my plate, but I'll certainly be evaluating this as a competitor to Unity, provided they add mobile platform deployment in a timely fashion. It's PC and Console for now, with mobile and VR systems to launch soon, so they say.

Kojack wrote:The main requirement is that if you do server stuff, it must be either AWS or your own hand rolled solution. You aren't allowed to use any commercial service that competes with AWS.

Ah OK thanks for pointing that out Kojack. That's good to know!

Although, I have a whole tech plan involving an AWS backend already in my next project. This offering has completely disrupted that plan, provided they get their mobile platform support completed in the next few months. I got the news alert while out shopping and thought, ok that's interesting but it's probably some runtime engine with limited tools support. Got home and found out I couldn't have been more wrong, the tools look amazing.

That's interesting that this is based on Crytek's work. The animation system is not how I remember at all, but then it's been a few years since I used CryEngine

The cryengine side has me a little concerned. I'm sure the tech is fine, but back (around 5 years ago) when they released cryengine for free I tried it out (and one of my students did a 12 week evaluation for an independent study project) and it was rather painful (things not working or poorly documented). The requirement to log in to use the editor was a wtf moment at the time (little did I know I'd have to do that in Unreal and Unity a few years later). Plus if you worked in a team, their login system was overly paranoid about two people sharing the editor, it would auto ban accounts. There was a 60+ page thread on the official forum where you could post your user name and crytech would unban you from the editor.

So Cryengine brings up bad memories. I'm sure it's gotten better since then.
I did appreciate that they supported education from the beginning. They explicitly said in the license that educational institutes could use it for free, while Unity made us buy licenses (students could use the free Unity, the college couldn't).

That's so funny you mention it ... I had to post on that 60 page long thread to get unbanned as well. I got into the CE3 release fairly early and things were exactly as you say. Buggy implementations, not conforming to documentation, or nonexistent documentation. Multiplayer, a key feature for us, was so plagued. I have kept in touch with a few people who say things have markedly improved, but I stopped using it because they were so painfully slow to actually process people's application for commercial licensing that I just couldn't wait around for them anymore. Also complete lack of mobile support.

Just browsing through the animation tools this looks like an entirely different animal than the CE3 I remember, but I see the similarities in some subsystems like the particle editor, and flow graphing.

insider wrote:But why exactly is amazon into the game industry, what's next ebay lumberjack.

Amazon stepped into mobile gaming a while back with Underground. Clearly distributing the source and tools under a free license is a push to increase uptake for their Amazon Web Services. Run a Battle.net scale multiplayer service at a fraction of the cost that Blizzard incurs ... it's an extremely attractive offering. Multiplayer games use a massive amount of bandwidth, and often require serious over-provisioning to handle peak hours or event-based spikes. It's a great market for AWS since they already have a rich offering of scaling services and load balancing. Scale up for peak, scale down after to save $$$

insider wrote:But why exactly is amazon into the game industry, what's next ebay lumberjack.

Amazon stepped into mobile gaming a while back with Underground. Clearly distributing the source and tools under a free license is a push to increase uptake for their Amazon Web Services. Run a Battle.net scale multiplayer service at a fraction of the cost that Blizzard incurs ... it's an extremely attractive offering. Multiplayer games use a massive amount of bandwidth, and often require serious over-provisioning to handle peak hours or event-based spikes. It's a great market for AWS since they already have a rich offering of scaling services and load balancing. Scale up for peak, scale down after to save $$$

Another point is the servers you use while in development will also cost a lot less but be on the infrastructure you will actually release on. And you can run production level servers for short periods reducing costs during betas.

So yes it's very attractive...

0 x

There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't...

Awe I just noticed they didn't retain scaleform in LumberYard as the UI ... that makes some sense, but I loved using scaleform :'( I thought about licensing it for the Ogre title I'm working on now, but it's minimum 500$ *per platform*. Then I considered Iggy from RAD Game Tools, but it's not cheap either. It's reasonably priced for what you get actually, but when you are rocking the 0$ MIT licensed everything ... anything seems expensive

On a related note: I just finished a flash-like UI toolkit based on Gorilla. I'll open source it once I'm finished my game's UI and I see everything works as it should!

Anarchy was half-assed in my humble opinion. Here's a free engine with a 5-6 digit $$$ upgrade path in order to publish to anything but mobile. Yeah OK ...

I get that Havok has a lucrative business selling their components piecemeal, with each optionally integrating with another, and they don't want to cannibalize that. The biggest names in the business use those components, and they are incredibly well crafted so I am not even knocking the value. But going just a portion of the way towards an indy offering was never going to cut it in this market. Maybe I am just overlooking what their strategy was there.

I had a quick look inside of Lumberyard today.
The zip file includes a 16GB copy of Clang for visual studio and xcode, 4+GB of WWise sound library and MANY other components.
I'm sure it could be reduced down to much smaller than a 10GB zip.
(I tried to 7zip it at work, but after 1 hour it said there was still 3 hours remaining and it was time to go home so I gave up)

as the song says...he's a lumberjack and he's ok...work all night and sleeps all day...
only 10gb...good thing they didn't pack windows10 inside....(=:
so its basicly cry-engine for free( cost amazon 50 million$ ) = good deal for crytek=i'm happy for them- true cg pioneers..( still remember being amazed with farcry )

0 x

the woods are lovely dark and deep
but i have promises to keep
and miles to code before i sleep
and miles to code before i sleep..

Well, looking at the press release, I think they hope to pull in income through the markplace for models / assets / etc. Basically like an appstore idea where they'll take a cut of each purchase. Hard to compete with free Unity3D, so I think they were forced into this.